East German jokes

[1] Elements of daily life, such as economic scarcity, relations between the GDR and the Soviet Union, or Cold War rival, the United States, were also common.

Though the Stasi continued to arrest joke-tellers, sentences against them declined sharply in the following decades; the last verdict of this nature was passed in 1972, against three engineers who had exchanged jokes during a breakfast break.

According to former BND president Hans Georg-Wieck, "political humor in totalitarian systems sometimes reveals grievances (...) more drastically and directly than sophisticated analysis is capable of.

Female BND agents in the East played the part of "train interrogators", collecting jokes on public transport from seemingly benign conversations with fellow passengers.

The fall of the Berlin Wall did not disrupt the operation; the final report, containing over 30 jokes and several pages of protest slogans, was sent to the Chancellery on 11 November 1990, 39 days after Germany reunified.